lpetrich

kinetekade's copy of someone else's document:
... God is not into grandstanding or showing off a miracle every time someone without faith issues a challenge. ...

That reminds me of the "shyness effect" in ESP research -- ESP doesn't happen when skeptics are present. It is a very convenient sort of evasion; everything else is expected to work properly when skeptics are present.

We would expect that the scientific evidence would be more consistent with the predictions of a world created by God than it would be with the evolutionary model.

As opposed to genetic engineering by time travelers who wanted to insure that they would come into existence?

To falsify the creation theory, an evolutionist would need to demonstrate the following:

Natural chemical processes that produces all of the components of life from non-life in quantities sufficient to account for all life on earth.

Hasn't this guy ever heard of the exponential nature of reproduction? All that's necessary is for one organism to emerge, and its descendants can proliferate as much as necessary.

A natural process that purifies amino acids in their left handed form, and sugars in their right hand form for use as the building blocks of life.

Such a process need not exist; the first self-reproducing system could simply select what it finds most convenient from a racemic Primordial Soup.

The origin of the DNA, RNA, protein manufacturing process.

The plausible "RNA world" scenario leaves the origin of RNA unexplained, it must be conceded.

However, DNA is a specialization of RNA; DNA nucleotides are produced from RNA ones and DNA is only present as a master copy.

Proteins are the result of early RNA using amino acids as cofactors; eventually the cofactors became bigger than the original RNA, becoming the whole enzyme, though with occasional vestigial bits of RNA being present.

The origin of photosynthesis and the appearance of chlorophyll.

Photosynthesis may have originally started out as a phototropism mechanism, which in turn was most likely derived from a chemotropism mechanism, with a light-detecting part being added to a chemical-detecting part.

The light detector could then have its excited electrons fed to some energy-metabolism pathways, thus enabling energy extraction. And the organism could then have extracted unexcited electrons from various sources, like hydrogen sulfide, eventually extracting them from water.

Chlorophyll's porphyrin group is prebiotic and is used in other cofactors; its terpene part was most likely originally a membrane lipid or something of that sort.

The origin of reproduction at the chemical level.

It would start out as RNA replication, and expand to organized cell division as opposed to becoming too big and spontaneously splitting.

The origin of the genetic code and the chemical infrastructure to make it work.

Most likely from some RNA-world ribozymes involved in amino-acid-cofactor assembly.

Once you have determined what these processes are, show that these processes are much more likely to happen than the processes that break down the components of life.

However, such built-up substances are fairly stable at temperatures lower than a few hundred degrees C.

Once you have demonstrated that the chemical origin of life is possible from off-the-shelf chemicals, show the biochemical changes that occur to increase the meaningful information content of organisms to produce the vast variety of creatures found today.

Gene duplication and subsequent evolution in different directions.

A corollary to this would be to show that mutations in the vast majority of cases are beneficial and promote evolution.

Unnecessary. All that is necessary is for the rate of reproduction to be enough to ensure that enough "good" ones be represented in future generations, regardless of the number of "bad" ones.

At the biochemical level, evolutionists haven't yet begun to explain their theory satisfactorily.

Demonstrably false.

Dr.GH

Add these to the photosynthesis list:

*Catling, David C., Kevin J. Zahnle, Christopher P. McKay
2001 “Biogenic Methane, Hydrogen Escape, and the Irreversible Oxidation of EarlyEarth” Science 293 (5531): 839

* This covers some of the important largescale events related to the appearence of oxigenic bacteria.

Des Marais, David J.
2000 “When Did Photosynthesis Emerge on Earth?” Science 289 (5485): 1703

*A. Lazcano & S.L. Miller
1994 How long did it take for life to begin and evolve to cyanobacteria Journal of Molecular Evolution 39(6): 546-554, December

* This covers some issues leading up to the wide development of oxigenic bacteria.

Albion

Is there some sort of reaon why "a world created by God" and "the evolutionary model" are mutually exclusive? The scientific evidence is solidly against the notion of recent separate creations of different species, but that says nothing about whether God had anything to do with evolution; it isn't a question that science can answer.


Who said anything about wanting to disprove God as creator? As long as you're talking about a deity who can do whatever he likes, despite the laws of nature, and conceal or reveal any bit of it he chooses to, there's no way you can prove anything. In any case, the point that scientists are making is NOT to disprove God as creator, although creationists seem incapable of understanding that, it's that evidence from the actual world is inconsistent with a literal reading of the book of Genesis. In other words, the problem is with the method and timescale, not with the overall concept of a creator as such. The problem is also with the notion of scientists being expected to use the holy book of a particular religion as evidence that overrides evidence from the universe itself.

DT, if you're still reading this thread, the honour of your presence is requested on the BBC Creation board, "Bad Design?" thread; there's IDiots over there demanding examples of bad design (while saying they won't make any difference anyway). Could you go and throw your list at them? I'm sure we're all interested to know why all thise things aren't bad design at all.

kinetekade

OK guys, thanks a lot Dr. GH, I'm having trouble finding some of those articles, but for the most part, everything's looking good. At least the stuff I can understand!

Ipetrich - Do you have any articles or sites handy regarding Chemotropism and those transitions? I'd like to do a little reading on the subject...

And here are a quite a few more topics/quotes that were brought up in the same discussion -

(If you have any responses that will put an end to all this Creato vagueness, I'm all ears!)









Ipetrich - This is the definition they provided. Over-simplified? What do you think?

:banghead:

Eh... where do I even begin to respond to all that nonsense?

Albion

Well, you could begin by explaining, probably in words of one syllable or less, why non-naturalistic explanations aren't scientific.

Well what a good thing that his personal opnion is irrelevent, then. Whale evolution may can the theory for him, but it's alive and well as far as scientists are concerned. I don't see the problem about breech births - he talks as if you have one generation of fully terrestrial mammals followed by one generation of fully marine mammals without those millions of years of transitions. Creationists really don't seem to have a handle on timescales.

He most certainly does not. You might want to ask these people how the creationist habit of quote-mining to make it appear that scientists are saying things they aren't saying is compatible with not bearing false witness.

Is this guy being serious? How does he think endosymbiosis was accepted after years of scepticism? Divine revelation from the non-god of evolution?

And that will always be the case because they've tied evolution so firmly to atheism and all the problems of society. These people have their heads so firmly in their Bibles that if God appeared and said, "Look, you idiots, I used evolution!" they'd respond, "No you didn't or the Bible would say so!" In the last analysis they've elevated the Bible above absolutely everything, and there's no way they'll change that. They've got far too much to lose. All you can do is be intelligible in case there are undecided lurkers around; the creationist posters like that one are beyond reasoning with.

Dr.GH

Well, I guess that one thing you might do is post a link to the URL with all these tender creationists. With a little hot sauce, and the right spices they can be real tasty. Yum Yum.

lpetrich

kinetekade:
Do you have any articles or sites handy regarding Chemotropism and those transitions? I'd like to do a little reading on the subject...

Here are some:

"Origin of Photosynthesis" by E.G. Nisbet, which proposes the origin of photosynthesis as a modification of infrared thermotaxis / phototaxis (swimming toward infrared glows). Also see:

Nisbet, E. G., Cann, J. R. & van Dover, C. L. Origins of photosynthesis. Nature 373, 479-480 (1995)

And here are a quite a few more topics/quotes that were brought up in the same discussion - (If you have any responses that will put an end to all this Creato vagueness, I'm all ears!)

(Evolution as all-or-nothing) That's so absurd as to not be worth replying to. I wonder what happens to all the microevolution that creationists concede the occurrence of.

"How did whales know to be purposely born breach (upside down) so as not to drown during birth? Mammals are born headfirst.

A simple alternative: whales are descended from some seal-ish animal (not seals themselves!) that was mostly aquatic but that came onto land to give birth. But every so often, a pregnant proto-whale would give birth before arriving at a calving beach. This birth would be head-first, causing the baby proto-whale to drown. However, some lucky proto-whale who gave birth tail-first would have a baby with a greater chance of survival. So something like "give birth tail-first in case you have to give birth in the water" would emerge. And being able to give birth in the water would mean the possibility of becoming permanently aquatic, never having to return to the land to give birth.

Does it tell us who it married? How it found a wife and if it had any kids? No. All we know is that it died. Fossils are not, and can never be, "proof" for evolution.

I wonder what these guys want -- a time machine?

How could we objectively test and falsify the hypothesis that progenotes evolved into procaryotes?

We don't have time machines, so one has to work backward and see if one can construct a coherent picture of their evolution -- in effect, constructing a sort of Hadean Park.

How could we objectively test the hypothesis that eucaryotes evolved via procaryotic endosymbiosis?

Such endosymbiosis, and its evil twin endoparasitism, has been known to happen among present-day organisms; some bacteria, like Rickettsia, have eukaryotic cell interiors as their preferred habitats.

Working backward, mitochondria are most closely related to alpha-proteobacteria like Rickettsia itself, and chloroplasts are most closely related to cyanobacteria. The origin of the nucleus is more obscure, but it has features that suggest an origin from archaebacteria.

How could we objectively test and falsify the hypothesis that true multi-cellularity evolved from colonies of single-celled organisms (i.e. the Volvox)?"

True multicellularity can evolve in a straightforward manner -- all that is necessary is for cells to differentiate by doing different sorts of growth, at the command of different quantities of growth factors acquired from their neighbors. And as cell-growth control becomes better understood, I'm sure that it will be possible to frame precise hypotheses on the origin of differentiation mechanisms.

Its a simple question. How did life come from non life? If you cannot answer this, then you have no case.

Abiogenesis != evolution. And although it is still an unsolved problem, some impressive progress has been made.

... There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this. ...

... In other words information cannot originate from disorganized matter. That is the theory and all science points to it. ...

However, creationists are very vague about what they mean by "information".

I'd like to see any evidence for whale evolution. But you wont find any.

Do the numerous fossils of cetaceans and proto-cetaceans count?

(kinetekade asked about)

phototropism - a tropism in which light is the orienting stimulus.

tropism - an innate tendency to react in a definite manner to stimuli; broadly : a natural inclination.

Those are correct definitions. Now back to the creationist:

Photosynthesis is still so complex that it is no even fully understood to date!

SO WHAT?

Part of that complexity is likely a lot of elaborations that make it more efficient; an ancestral photosyntesizer was likely very inefficient, in the way that a Walking Catfish is an inefficient land animal.

Finally, you still have not provided anything to show how new information can arrise! Thus annuling any imaginitive mechanism.

Again, no definition for "information".

Evolution doesn't apply to any of them because evolution doesn't happen!

Pure question-begging.

You've still shown us 0 evidence for evolution. Surely with all the thousands upon thousands of families of animals we would see some sort of evolution happening(not micro). ...

Except that anything we see at the present day the creationists will label "micro-evolution".

kinetekade

Sounds like fun Dr. GH I'll bring the hot sauce - www.abcbodybuilding.com You'll have to register before posting. Of the 15,000 or so members, I'm aware of one Atheist (who doesn't know what the hell he's talking about) and another Agnostic (who doesn't say anything at all). Of course, I try to do my best. Keep in mind, everything is still somewhat new to me, and I have a lot to learn. The true scientific opposition came from another member, Mordred, but as may have guessed, those Creato moderators didn't put up with him for long (Banned! ). You guys might know Mordred; he gave me the link to this site! Defending Science against their ridiculous accusations and learning a thing or two are the reasons I post in response to religious threads. Wouldn't you respond to this? -

I'm sure it's been brought up before. Filled with fallacy, and I pointed that out to everyone, only to receive more criticism than what was in my reply. If any of you guys have the free time to pound some sense into a stubborn mass of Creationists, be my guest! Just try not to be too harsh... ABC is still the best bodybuilding site on the net Thanks again for all your help!

kinetekade

I just noticed that I probably need to be more specific. This type of discussion is done on the "Athletes Shooting the Breeze" forum. The last thread of this nature is titled "Christian" and might be a page or two back unless it's been bumped recently. If you were serious about helping me out Dr. GH, now would be the time. They've thrown even more at me since my last post, and now I'm thinking about abandoning the discussion altogether. Sorry if that sounded dramatic

kinetekade

And they're still using cartoons



I think I might give 'em a taste of their own medicine... anyone have any clever Evolution/anti-YEC cartoons?